


Confessional

by MousselineSerieuse



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Character Study, Depending on your view of the epilogue, F/M, Female-Centric, Gen, Post-Canon, mild sexual references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-25 00:32:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3789943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MousselineSerieuse/pseuds/MousselineSerieuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marya is not surprised—not very, at least—when Nikolai arrives unexpectedly in her sitting room two weeks before the wedding and says he needs to talk to her about Sonya. Maryacentric, canon-compliant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confessional

Marya can tell that Sonya doesn’t like her, and at first she doesn’t know why. Not that Sonya ever does or says anything against her, but there is something in the set of her shoulders and the shape of her mouth that speaks of dislike. She addresses Marya formally, as Princess or Marya Nikolayevna or even sometimes Your Highness, long after she has become Masha to everyone else. There can be resentment in deference. Marya, of all people, should know that.

At first she thinks that her fiancé’s cousin is afraid she will be expelled from the household upon Nikolai’s marriage, and so she tries quietly to reassure her that this is not the case. One afternoon she holds forth at length about the plan and appearance of the house at Bald Hills, and describes several rooms she thinks Sonya might want to claim for herself. After twenty minutes of this, Sonya leaps up with tears in her eyes, mumbles, “Excuse me,” and flees, and Marya realizes that is not it at all. After that she starts noticing the way Sonya glances at Nikolai when she thinks no one is looking, the way the old countess is always quick to interrupt her whenever she seems to be moving too close to him.

And so she is not surprised—not very, at least—when Nikolai arrives unexpectedly in her sitting room two weeks before the wedding and says he needs to talk to her about Sonya.

He relates the whole history to her, kneeling before her like a supplicant. She sits perfectly still, studying his face as he speaks, and when he is done she takes him by the hand and pulls him up to sit beside her.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have told you earlier. I didn’t—I wasn’t sure how. If you want to cancel—or postpone anything—I would understand.”

She looks at him, his dark tousled hair gleaming in the late-afternoon sun, and turns his hand over in hers. In the past months she has learned much about him, things she jealously (perhaps foolishly) thinks nobody else can know. She has seen the place on his shoulder where a French artillery shell hit him all those years ago, she has run her fingers down along his chest. But now she looks at him and she sees all that they do not know about each other, everything that passed through and around and between them before that afternoon at Bogucharovo. How can you describe the entire experience of your life? He has never met her father, she thinks, and now he never will.

“Do you still love her?” she asks, quiet and careful and slightly afraid.

He pauses, looks away, considers it. And then suddenly his eyes flash up to meet hers. “No,” he says, almost regretfully. “I don’t. But—I used to. Or I thought I did. And we were engaged for a long time.”

“How long?”

“It started—not officially—before I left for the war. And it ended when I was in Voronezh.”

Voronezh. Marya remembers Voronezh: mourning a father, losing a brother, gaining a husband—not yet her husband. “And you broke it off with her?”

“No. She did, actually. I think she expected me to come back and ask her again.”

“Oh.” She says. “And is she still in love with _you_?”

Another pause. “I—I don’t know. She hasn’t said anything. But, well—Sonya doesn’t really give up on things.”

Marya nods, considers this. What he’s talking about is undying devotion, and there is enough of her father’s daughter left in her that she admires that. Sonya must have been in love with him years ago, and never once stopped to reconsider it. She has often wished that she could be so unwavering. (Often she wonders whether she would have stayed with her father, would have cared for him as long as she did, if she had not known in her heart that for all his anger he still loved her the most.)

“Are you sure she wants to live with us after we are married?” she asks. “Does she not want to go to Natasha’s? Or even to set up her own household?”

“No,” he says immediately. “I promised I would take care of her. I—I’m sorry, I can’t go back on my word to her. Not now. She’s good with bookkeeping and children and things, she can be helpful. Unless you don’t—.” He trails off, turns away from her, and in that moment she can almost feel how miserable he is, how vulnerable. His fate as well as Sonya’s is in her hands. Perhaps someone else would be upset to hear her fiancé swear devotion to his cousin over her, but Marya feels such a deep stab of affection for him that she can barely contain it.

Softly, she says, “I won’t make her into a servant. She doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do.”

He lifts his head and looks at her, half-shocked. “So—you’ll accept it?”

For a moment, Marya hesitates. She thinks about Lise Meinen dying in her brother’s bed. She thinks about Amélie wandering the halls with perfume dabbed on her wrists, trailing after Andrei and later after Papa. She thinks about herself at sixteen or seventeen, younger than either she or Sonya is now, waiting at the door of her father’s study. _She will be the wife, and you will be the companion._ She thinks about Andrei’s face, cool and serene, and Natasha’s arm around her. She thinks about Anatole Kuragin, dead at Borodino, a national hero, or so everyone says. _And what if you catch them in the garden?_

She looks at Nikolai, nervous, expectant, his face shadowed in the gathering dark. She knows that she is not Lise, or Amélie, or Sonya, and nor is she her father or Andrei. And she thinks that maybe the best things are the ones you have to risk something for, the ones you have to trust. She looks at Nikolai and she thinks that he is worth trusting. And so she leans forward and presses his head against her shoulder and absolves him.


End file.
